What are the latest trends and tools for social media monitoring and analysis in corporate communications?

Accurate and reliable consumer feedback has eluded marketers since the dawn of modern marketing. Neil Borden and Jerome McCarthy would have killed to have this kind of marketing intelligence. Which is why having reliable data and ability to effectively analyze what is says and what it means with regard to your strategy is imperative. Make sure the data is reliable. The second part is analysis. Don’t make assumptions. Don’t gut-guess the data. Analyze from all angles and ask yourself, “what is the data telling me?”

It is easy to be overwhelmed by the availability of the data, or to be panicking because you do not see enough engagement or there is a mismatch between your efforts and the results. I disagree with the notion that you need to look at multiple platforms, my strategy has always been to monitor the most active channels my clients are actually using (say Instagram) and then look on other platforms, search for competitors and see if they are active or not, and what posts are successful. We have finite resources, we may as well use them wisely.

These are a lot of words. Social listening is what I referred above: look at your account and your competitors in the space. But more importantly: invest in video. The rest is filler here.

AI and ML are certainly trends, as they are in virtually all facets of business. However what I see as a key trend is how other internal business functions (like business intelligence) are increasingly involved in aggregating, parsing and charting social media monitoring data for the organization. It’s a benefit for communications professionals to learn how to work with those teams, use their platforms and help guide their efforts toward strategic insights.

One of the greatest watch-outs when entering into 'social listening' is that you will only see the data to which the social platforms grant access. Twitter provides more searchable, public info than Facebook, which means that you'll get more insight about a Twitter audience than that of a Facebook, despite far fewer people actually using the platform. One of the main implications of this is you can't draw credible conclusions about the wider pool of social media users based on data from more open platforms. They're useful for tracking long-term metrics, sentiment drivers, etc., spotting trending topics, and crisis comms, but need proper focus to deliver against these use cases.

If you are a small / medium size business or a startup, you can use the enterprise tools available in each platform you think is worth looking into. Following my previous thoughts, if you first identify the most popular platforms for your company, then benchmark where others are and why, I would rather spend money promoting your product and service than paying for a social listening tool. If you are a bigger firm, then talk to your marketing team and test everything before committing.

The irony of a LinkedIn post about monitoring social media metrics at scale is not lost on me. It’s possible for company pages, but now where near as easy as it could be. And all the good stuff that we used to have at a personal profile level has been replaced first with nothing and now with a much reduced version. Please please please can we go back to the data we had in 2016 and allow everyone to know how well they’re doing on all fronts, easily, without having to pay for Shield to do so? And can we make it possible for social media experts to be able to report at scale for their organisations and their employees? That would be a game changer and would be something I’d pay company page premium for. Thanks. :-)

Whatever you choose to measure, don't lose sight of the fact that nothing on social that can be measured, can be measured in totality! People forget this and over-index on things like 'last click' or sentiment without accounting for the broad range of other influences that it's much harder to account for. Everything should be treated as a proxy, and conveying this to your stakeholders in the most constructive way possible is really important. That said, it's also important to make sure you're measuring what you can influence, and relaying that to your stakeholders in clear terms so that they understand how off-social action - rather than what you are posting on the channels - is required to improve the position.

It is true: you need to choose what to measure. My preferred metrics are click-troughs (not "views", who really cares about them?), actual sales or donations, and number of new users following you.